1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a color filter and the related fabricating method, and more particularly, to a color filter applied to a color display device and the related fabricating method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Due to continued development and advancement in electrical technology, the variety of applications as well as the demand for liquid crystal displays is ever increasing. A liquid crystal display (LCD) is one type of flat panel display and is employed extensively in applications ranging from small-scale products, such as a digital watch, to various portable electronic devices such as PDAs and notebooks, and even to commercial large panel displays. Since an LCD has the advantages of lightweight, low energy consumption, and free of radiation emission, the LCD is extensively applied to informational products and has a great potential for the future. Taking a thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) as an instance, the TFT-LCD basically includes a thin film transistor (TFT) substrate, a color filter (CF) substrate, and a liquid crystal layer disposed between the TFT substrate and the CF substrate.
In the traditional process of manufacturing a TFT-LCD, the method of fabricating a color filter mainly includes the following three steps: spin coating the photoresist slurries having three primary colors, red (R), green (G) and blue (B); exposing; and developing. However, the remaining photoresist slurries is only about 1%-2% of the total provided photoresist slurries in the traditional method of fabricating the color filter. About 90% of the total photoresist slurry is flung out in the spin coating process, and then about 70% of the remaining photoresist slurry is removed in the developing process. In addition, a procedure, which includes a coating step, a pre-baking step, an exposing step and a developing step, can only form photoresists with a single color. In other words, it takes three procedures, which includes three coating steps, three pre-baking steps, three exposing steps and three developing steps, to form photoresists with three colors, and therefore the process is complicated and is a high-power consumer. Due to these problems, an ink-jet process is poised to replace the traditional spin coating process for fabricating color filters.
Please refer to FIG. 1, which is a schematic diagram illustrating a conventional method of fabricating a color filter by an ink-jet process. As shown in FIG. 1, a glass substrate 26 is first provided, and the needed color filter pattern is next formed on the glass substrate 26 by utilizing ink-jet equipment 20. The ink-jet equipment 20 includes at least an ink-jet nozzle (also named as nozzle in the following description) 22 and a control device (not shown in the drawings). The glass substrate 26 includes a black matrix pattern (BM pattern) 28 as a shelter from improper reflecting light beams or improper refracting light beams. Subsequently, photoresist slurries 24 directly jet out of the nozzle 22 to the glass substrate 26. Thus, photoresist slurries 24 with different colors jet to the predetermined vacant spaces in the black matrix pattern 28 respectively according to the different processes or the different product requirements. After the photoresist slurries with different colors are jetted onto the glass substrate 26, a curing process is performed on the photoresist slurries 24 to form a stable colored photoresist, and a color filter 10 is therefore fabricated.
However, overflows of the photoresist slurries 24 exist in the conventional ink-jet process. As shown in FIG. 2, when the red photoresist slurries 25R are jetted in a second ink-jet process after the blue photoresist slurries 25B are jetted in a first ink-jet process, the red photoresist slurries 25R overflow toward the blue photoresist slurries 25B. Thus, the photoresist slurries of different colors interblend with each other. The fabricated color filter 10 therefore has problems of disordered hues, and displays adopting this color filter 10 have a serious color shift problem.